To any academic working on algorithmic accountability whom I've offended with my NYTimes piece today: I know you're working hard, against the odds. I'm trying to make the point that you deserve *much more support*. The tech companies are absolutely more powerful than we are.

I understand that these kinds of things play better if they're sensationalized, but it did describe us (and academic departments that care enough to hire us) as "asleep at the wheel." :( More support always welcome though!

It's not about being offended! To get that *much more support* for this work, you need the correct analysis of *why* we don't have it. It's not because academics are "asleep at the wheel." We're deliberately attacked, defunded, blocked and pressured to stop us from critical work!

this is absolutely right - C, you know so many of us are out here, see us at the same events, fight in meetings/panels to get the same points across. Why not highlight those robust efforts, often by women and POC rather than paint us all as unreflective academics chasing $??

And despite the deliberate defunding, and that the data belongs to corporations that often don't like the criticism and the pressure, there is so much work—which you know! If you mean CS departments: say that *and* even there, we need a better framing of what's going on and why.

The issue for media and technology scholars is that we have been expressing these concerns for a long time. But the worst is that we face a number of hurdles, not least of which is the fact that STEM academics continually fail to even notice that we've been on this issue forever.

Sorry. You don't make that argument anywhere. Instead, your own Tweet claims, "and so far, academia is asleep at the wheel."
twitter.com/mathbabedotorg…
It's offensive to lots of people who have been doing good work for decades. And it's just false.

It certainly doesn't read that way, but rather: "no one in academia works on this or cares"...Funny, I thought there was decades' worth of work (and counting) in HCI, science and technology studies, etc. exactly on these issues...